Background
The company I’m working in would like to launch an iOS app to support an hardware device that interacts with some mechanical automatism (aimed to home and building automation) we already produce.
Such automatism receives the pulse needed to activate itself from a nearby bluetooth device, whose MAC address is known by a white list.
We already know of the need to sign up to the MFi program for Bluetooth hardware to connect and talk effectively with Apple devices, exchanging significant messages, but what it is demanded here is to simply detect the presence of such MAC address. No need to establish protocol sessions and the like.
The facts
Investigating how to programmatically enable/disable Bluetooth interface in iOS, I learned it is impossible without private frameworks, as this post states; that is not an option for us, as the app has to be published on the App Store and it is known that Apple rejects apps including code that is coming from private frameworks.
By the way, the app usability would greatly benefit from a direct access to that feature, so I started thinking if, instead of directly interact with Bluetooth on/off state, would it be possible to let the user access to the Bluetooth preference pane straight from the application.
Does anyone know about that?
No, unfortunately it’s not possible. There was a trick with:
but it was opening only the preferences (not straight to bluetooth settings) and it’s disabled in iOS 5.1. So your only chance is to make a really good help screen (with nice graphics and animations maybe) that explains the user how to enable the bluetooth.